Another pulse of diversification occurred immediately following the K-Pg extinction of the dinosaurs, when mammals had more room, resources and stability.
The research - which was conducted with collaborators at the University of California, Davis University of California, Riverside and the American Museum of Natural History - concludes that mammals began diversifying before the K-Pg extinction as the result of continental drifting, which caused the Earth’s land masses to drift apart and come back together over millions of years. “By performing new types of analyses only possible because of Zoonomia’s massive scope, we answer the question of where and when mammals diversified and evolved in relation to the K-Pg mass extinction.” “The central argument is about whether placental mammals (mammals that develop within placentas) diverged before or after the Cretaceous-Paleogene (or K-Pg) extinction event that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs,” Foley shared. The “mammalian tree of life” maps out the evolution of mammals over more than 100 million years and is crucial to the goals of the Zoonomia Project.Credit: Texas A&M University Their ultimate goal is to better identify the genetic basis for traits and diseases in people and other species.įoley’s efforts in the research produced the world’s largest mammalian phylogenetic tree to date. The study, published on April 28 in the journal Science, is part of a series of articles released by the Zoonomia Project, a consortium of scientists from around the globe that is using the largest mammalian genomic dataset in history to determine the evolutionary history of the human genome in the context of mammalian evolutionary history. Their work provides a definitive answer to the evolutionary timeline of mammals throughout the last 100 million years. Research led by a team of scientists from the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences puts to bed the heated scientific debate regarding the history of mammal diversification as it relates to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. The research uses the genomes of 241 species and can be used to support animal and human health outcomes. This study, part of the Zoonomia Project, could significantly impact human medicine and biodiversity conservation by aiding in the identification of genetic disease targets and the understanding of human trait evolution. Researchers from Texas A&M University have used the largest mammalian genomic dataset to track the evolutionary history of mammals, concluding that mammal diversification began before and accelerated after the dinosaur extinction.
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